


vast in the way that the vacuum is vast

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Autistic Seven of Nine, Banter, Conversations, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of alcohol, Metaphors, Post-Season/Series 01, Psychological Trauma, Raffi's skill in emotional analsyis, Semi-established relationship, Stuck In A Turbolift, brief mentions of past Bjayzl/Seven, on top of being ex-Borg Seven of Nine, we love metaphorical neurodivergence and actual neurodivergence in this ficwriting house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27444283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: When Seven finds herself stuck with Raffi in a shorted turbolift after a simple repair goes wrong, her attempt to offer Raffi comfort from the lowgrade stress of the situation at hand leads to a discussion of the nature of the danger and despair that recent events have caused.
Relationships: Raffi Musiker/Seven of Nine
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32
Collections: Femslash Exchange 2020





	vast in the way that the vacuum is vast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/gifts).



> A femslashex fic for Luna, who prompted, among other things, characters trapped in an enclosed space together, and wondered "What's it like for Raffi to start living with the fact an obsession that wrecked her life, and now she knows she was right all along, but that doesn't put the pieces back together? How does Seven of Nine feel about having tapped back into the Borg? How can they ease each other's loneliness?" Thanks for your prompt--I had a blast exploring my version of an answer and I hope you enjoy! :) These two come with all the opportunity for angst but deserve all the good things.

It was meant to be a simple repair. It was meant to be a simple repair, and while it’s been years since engineering repairs were central to Seven’s responsibilities, they’re still very much in her wheelhouse. Accordingly, she was confident that La Sirena’s aft turbolift would be up and running in no time. Raffi--who, while not an engineer of the more mechanical kind, has the baseline high level of technological expertise to be expected of any current or former Starfleet personnel--was along more or less to keep her company, sitting on crate next to Seven’s upturned bucket and zapping the relays’ casings back together with the phase regulator as Seven reconnected each one.

It was meant to be a simple repair, but things are rarely simple in space, and all it took was Seven leaving one relay not fully connected to its grounding frame when she flicked the power back on to the panel for the entire turbolift to short out into darkness and ominous silence, shuddering briefly as its external safety system kept it suspended safely in the lift shaft.

Seven and Raffi manage to stay on their jury-rigged seating, though both have to reach for a wall. On the ceiling, the safety lights blink on, and Seven swears at the same time as Raffi sighs.

“That,” Seven pronounces, regarding the blown relay gloomily, “was on me.”

“You’re all right,” Raffi tells her immediately, her eyes tender as she regards Seven.

Seven smiles, accepting the absolution. She did give ample notice and made sure they both had their body parts well clear when she restored power; it wasn’t anything safety-critical that she fell down on. No need to beat herself up about a minor technical mistake.

“Raffi to Cris,” Raffi is saying, but only silence answers her.

Now it’s Seven’s turn to sigh. “They’re not picking up our signals from in here, are they?”

Raffi shakes her head. “Appears not.”

Seven sighs again, leaning back against the wall. “Unless you have any tricks to whip out of your back pocket, in a non-emergency situation, playing with an entirely shorted lift from the inside is going to be more danger than it’s worth. I say we wait around to be rescued.” She smirks. “Let someone else do some work around here for once.”

Raffi snorts. “That sounds like a plan to me.”

“Shouldn’t be more than an hour or two before they noticed we’ve vanished doing the lift repairs,” Seven says, glancing at the turbolift doors. “Might as well get comfortable while we wait.” Climbing off her bucket, she clambers to the floor, stretching out her legs as she leans back against the wall. Smiling, Raffi joins her, settling herself a meter away.

“So, what’s next?” Seven teases. “Truth or Dare?”

“You wish.”

Seven grins, sighing again. “Cris is gonna love this, isn’t he?”

“Getting to sulk around for days about how you wounded his poor starship with your roguish ranger ways?” Raffi grins. “He’ll enjoy every second of it.”

The turbolift shudders again, just slightly, as though in pre-audition for its captain’s sympathy, and both of them stiffen slightly, looking around themselves warily.

“External safety system will keep it in place just fine,” Raffi says softly; words they both already know are true, but Seven has to admit that it’s a comfort to hear her say them all the same. She nods in tacit thanks for the comfort, and Raffi smiles.

After considering what to say for another 3.73 seconds, Seven ventures, with another smirk, “So, if not Truth or Dare…Go Fish?”

Raffi bites her lip against a laugh, raising an eyebrow at her. “We don’t have cards.”

“Dancing lessons?”

“Not enough space.”

“Duck Duck Goose?”

“Not enough geese.”

They’re both snickering now. As Seven rolls her eyes, however, the lift shudders again just slightly, and she startles in spite of herself.

Raffi winces visibly, gazing around once again at the lift’s walls and letting out a long sigh in the stillness that follows. “God, I could use a drink right about now.”

Externally, Seven nods—after all, she feels much the same way at this particular point in time, and she isn’t about to make a distressed production over an adult woman who happens to struggle with her substance use expressing an idle wish not to be sober at the moment—but internally, she scans for what comfort or distraction she can offer.

Well. They’re stuck in a turbolift. She doesn’t have much on hand to give. Nor does she have a good sense of what kind of distraction or other comfort might work well for the other woman stuck here with her. Seven’s own relationship with alcohol has always stayed just this side of causing her problems; she can have a drink or two without more calling to her, and go a day or two without a drink, and if the latter timeframe might be a _bit_ on the concerning side, it isn’t something she’s ever begun any intentional research on the process of addressing.

While her work as a ranger entails basic knowledge of psychological care and first aid, figuring out how to distract herself or someone else from how much they wish they weren’t currently sober is, unlike turbolift repairs, not in Seven’s wheelhouse.

Not yet, anyway. If she keeps up her…thing…with Raffi, she reflects, then maybe it’d better start to be.

Over the last couple weeks on La Sirena, she and Raffi have made it past flirting to…whatever the stage after flirting is. Flirting while already knowing the answer. And they’ve kissed, once, quick and tender, lips meeting for a few seconds outside the cabin Seven is staying in.

They certainly have, at minimum, what B’Elanna Torres would refer to as ‘a thing’ going, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve have become _a couple._ They care about each other, but they don’t know each other, not yet, not really.

Nor, come to think of it, have they touched all that much beyond that kiss.

Seven weighs her next move for another 4.03 seconds.

“You want to come over here?” she asks, matter-of-factly, patting the floor beside her.

Raffi looks up at her in mild surprise, but the offer must neither be unwelcome nor come across as unintentionally condescending—Seven doesn’t know where Raffi is on the Starfleet officer scale of feeling guilty and defensive about mental illness and other forms of supposed weakness, but she’s known enough current and former Starfleet crew to not want to chance it—because she smiles and slides herself across the floor toward Seven, leaning carefully against her side.

Seven wraps an arm around her, and Raffi rests her cheek against her shoulder with a quiet exhale that Seven can feel in Raffi’s whole body as she rests against Seven’s shoulder; her hip; her ribcage.

They sit for a minute in gentle silence. Seven can hear, very faintly, the omnipresent hum of the warp core, but aside from that, the shorted-out lift is unnaturally silent. Raffi is a comforting presence beside her, the warm weight of her body against Seven’s soothing in a way that few things really are these days.

She can hear Raffi’s breathing growing deeper, more even, as they sit together, relaxing into each other’s warmth.

“We should do this more often,” Raffi says drily, breaking the silence.

Seven snorts. “And dismay our Captain Rios?”

“Oh, that’s a feature, not a bug.”

Seven laughs aloud.

They sit in silence for another moment, and Seven is just fishing around for something else to say when Raffi says softly, “Speaking of dismay and crewmates…how are you doing after your little run-in this morning?” She hesitates. “And…I mean, you obviously weren’t a fan of the way Picard asked you about it, nor do a I blame you, but…I _have_ been meaning to ask you about it, myself,” she adds, the admission at once gentle and matter-of-fact. “Connecting to the cube was no small thing. How’re you holding up?”

Raffi Musiker, trapped in an occasionally-shuddering turbolift, looking past her own nerves to check on something she’s noticed about Seven.

Characteristic.

Seven feels some intense emotion in her chest; whether it’s gratitude at the gesture of care, emotion stirred up by the question, or something else, she isn’t sure.

She squeezes Raffi closer in a quick hug as she releases a long, steadying breath through her nose. “I’m doing all right. Thanks for asking, Musiker.”

Raffi moves her cheek against Seven’s shoulder in a minute nuzzle of acknowledgment, letting the silence stretch out without saying anything more.

“It—”

Seven starts and stops again. Raffi is silent, waiting.

Seven closes her eyes. “I shouldn’t have bit Picard’s head off, regardless. But…” She sighs. “The feelings that I have about the incident are not the feelings that other people assume I might have about it,” she explains, allowing herself to slide into a comfortable monotone as she navigates the rococo emotional endeavor that is attempting to generate a comprehensive explanation of something of such psychological complexity. “And that makes it easy to get frustrated when they…” She hesitates. When they worry? When they express concern? No, Raffi expressed concern about it—well, expressed concern about her biting Picard’s head off when he expressed concern about it, anyway—and she isn’t frustrated with _her._ “Assume,” she finishes.

“I see,” Raffi says, sounding sympathetic.

A pause.

 _“Do_ you want to talk about it?” she asks simply. “What it really was to you, I mean?”

Seven finds herself surprised, despite herself, at the frankness of the offer. While she’s seen that Raffi sometimes avails herself of frankness, at the end of the day, Raffi has a background in intelligence work; Seven is accustomed to, and maybe has been bracing herself slightly for, the ways in which Raffi too will favor the indirectness and mind games of so many of the people that Seven has crossed paths with in her time out in this part of space.

In her time in the Sol system part of space, too.

“Don’t mind the opportunity to set the record straight,” she replies, drawing a chuckle out of Raffi, and then feels herself deflate slightly as she closes her eyes, trying to figure out how to explain the disconnect in question.

“People who know me seem to assume—and it _is_ better than assuming it wouldn’t be hard at all,” she cuts herself off to interject. “Seem to assume,” she continues, “that…that hooking myself back into a Borg cube would be some…some deep trauma. Something fundamentally, existentially horrifying to me. And it…it isn’t that it that is entirely untrue. It isn’t that I’d want to do it again, that’s for certain.”

Raffi continues to listen in silence, and Seven thinks of that terrible but so-quick moment when she chose, twenty years after being wrenched free from the Borg, to, for the sake of the safety of all the people around her, link herself back in. Thinks of the moments when she was part of it again, an all-consuming flood of voices and intent; thinks of the moment when she steeled herself and tore free, returning to one empty Human body. Tries to figure out how to explain.

“It wasn’t that bad,” she finally says, staring in front of her at the place where the side of the lift meets the floor, “compared to other things.”

“Oh,” says Raffi, in a tone that tells her that she immediately understands exactly what she means, even without the details of why, in this particular situation, this is the case.

Seven exhales softly, and they sit in silence for another moment.

“You know that the Borg assimilated me and my parents when I was seven years old,” she says.

Raffi nods against her shoulder.

“I was the first person to be permanently freed from the Borg by the Federation,” Seven continues. “To many people in the Federation, this…defined me. Wherever I go, if I encounter Starfleet personnel like yourself and Cris Rios and Jean-Luc Picard, they see me as the ex-Borg Annika Hansen, Seven of Nine, even if a long way _ex_ now. And, I suppose, that is more or less the way I think of…I’ve always thought of my own life.” She closes her eyes. “I still have nightmares about being pursued through my parents’ research vessel by drones. Assimilation was—foundational to who I am, in all sense of the word.”

Raffi makes the slightest sound of sympathy, a trace of sympathetic whimper-sigh.

“A defining trauma, both internally and externally,” Seven finishes. “And yet, forty years from that day, I came face to face with this part of my past, once more connecting to a Borg hivemind to save lives in the course of my job as a ranger. And it—”

She pauses. She can feel, in the gentle tension in Raffi’s body, how intently the other woman is listening.

“It was—unpleasant.” She laughs at herself slightly. “It was _more_ than unpleasant. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done, ripping myself free again. But—” She smiles slightly, jostling Raffi’s shoulder gently with her own. “I don’t have to tell you that, after you live in this galaxy enough decades, you end up doing a _lot_ of ‘hardest things you’ve ever done.’ What, two or three a year, maybe?”

“Depends on the year,” Raffi says drily, and Seven chuckles.

“Well, I guess you could say that, out of the dozens of hardest things I’ve ever gone through, what happened on this cube last month was…” She shrugs. “No worse than the others.” Closing her eyes and swallowing, she adds, “And—better than quite a few.”

Raffi makes a soft _ah_ noise, her body shifting slightly as though the moment of understanding is something that sinks through her from head to toe. “And that wasn’t what you would have expected,” she surmises. “And realizing it has brought you face to face with just how bad the other things have been?”

Seven nods, finding herself startled, and not for the first time, by Raffi’s speed in interpreting emotional data. “Yes,” she says simply.

Raffi presses herself against Seven just slightly, reaching a hand towards her. Wordlessly, Seven reaches the hand of the arm not wrapped around her to lace her fingers into hers, and for a full thirty-two seconds, they sit in silence.

“One thing I’ve thought about, over the decades, as I got more experience rescuing people and helping people during various types of trouble,” Seven says, reflectively, “is that Borg are frightening in the way that the ocean is frightening. They’re impossibly vast. Completely dispassionate. It’s easy to see,” she adds, “why people are terrified of them. And for good reason.”

Raffi nods.

“But—” Seven closes her eyes, pushing away the sudden rush of memories of the expression in Bjayzl’s eyes. The amusement. “But—with the exception of the Queen—they’re not malicious. They’re cruel in the way the ocean is cruel, not cruel because they are deliberately _choosing_ to be _cruel.”_

Raffi nods. “Ah,” she says, very softly.

Seven closes her eyes, thinking of all these decades. Assimilated girl, ex-Borg, all grown up, hurt some more, and some more, and some more. Hurt beyond what she thought could be encompassed in the word _hurt._ And she has learned—

What? To cope with it?

Not really.

But she is a different woman, now, than she was decades ago, with, by necessity, a different and fuller grasp on how to make her way through the unbearable, and a brutally expanded definition of just how _unbearable_ unbearable can be. And apparently, conquering what once would have been her most terrifying demons is not all that much worse than the things that happen in the average month ranging. Isn't worse at all than some of the things that came before that.

“I can see,” Raffi says, “why it would be…frustrating, to say the least, for us to assume that it was something cataclysmic to you.” She slides her hand out of Seven’s to trace it through the air as though conjuring up a window, a painting, some thing not seen. “A way of making the cataclysmic cruelty of the more malicious things that have happened to you and your loved ones invisible.”

Seven presses her lips together, nodding shortly.

Raffi says nothing more, just threads her hand back into Seven's again, and Seven closes her eyes, her awareness even of how much time is passing fading into warmth and stillness. Gradually, Raffi’s breathing deepens and evens again, and Seven turns to her cheek to rest against her hair. She smells of coffee and something that must be floral but makes Seven think, unaccountably, of the way a comet looks as it shimmers through inner space.

“And how have you been doing, Musiker?” she asks.

Raffi takes a breath, hesitates, lets it out again. “Making my way along. One day at a time, right?”

“Mm.” Seven presses a cheek against her hair again, waiting for Raffi to say more if she wants to.

“I can grasp part of what you meant about the Borg, I think,” Raffi continues, quietly, after the slow elapse of 9.02 seconds. “I live in the desert, back on Earth. Out there, nothing’s trapping you; closing you in. Not the way we’re trapped in this lift, anyway.” She gestures with a hand. “But you can walk, and walk, and walk, and there’s no edge you’ll be able to get to. It’s the vastness of it, as much as the heat and the dryness, that’s cruel.”

Seven nods. “Yes,” she says.

Raffi takes a breath, then hesitates. “I don’t want to malform your metaphor,” she says, “but…”

Seven makes a _don’t-worry-about-it_ hum.

Raffi goes on. “When you talked about that, the pitilessness of vastness, it made me wonder…” She hesitates again, this time as though in thought rather than as courtesy. “I wonder if an argument could be made,” she continues, slowly, “that what you described about the Borg is, in its own way, an aspect of—maybe _the_ core aspect of what the Federation and the Zhat Vash has been to…” She hesitates, pointing at the turbolift doors with her chin, as if to include Cris and Agnes and the others. “Us.”

For the first time since Raffi settled against her side, Seven tilts her head away from hers enough to glance at her face. This close to Seven’s eyes, Raffi’s face is a blur, but she can see the gears-turning look in Raffi’s eyes.

“How do you mean?” Seven asks.

“When you talk about what’s most frightening about an encounter with the Borg,” Raffi says, straightening up from Seven’s shoulder and gesturing slightly with her hands, “you describe it as…as that pitilessness and implacability and dispassion. Or, no, you talked about how the thing that is the most frightening is _the vastness of_ that mercilessness and pitilessness and dispassion. That it’s an ocean,” she says, sweeping one graceful hand out as if spreading an ocean across the turbolift floor, “too vast to see any shore.”

Seven nods. “Yes,” she confirms quietly.

Raffi turns to meet her gaze, expression meaningful, and Seven meets her gaze for a minute, tilting her own head roguishly to the side—making eye contact is always about performance, given that Seven doesn’t get out of it… _whatever_ it is that other people get out of it…aside from the mild discomfort of the universe narrowing so overwhelmingly to the other person’s gaze.

For Seven, the information that she gets from acts of eye contact comes from context clues. In this case, Raffi’s turning to meet Seven’s gaze is, Seven is sure, a query as to whether Seven is following her train of thought.

Seven is. “The vastness of _their_ mercilessness and implacability,” she says, dipping her chin towards the door to indicate Starfleet and the Zhat Vash, Altan Soong and Bjayzl and all the rest. “You’d posit the vastness of their lack of regard for the wellbeing of those they deem unworthy as the most concretely dangerous and psychologically traumatizing aspect of encountering them.”

Raffi nods. “The way you look into their eyes,” she says softly, “and see how you and everything you think and feel has become…nothing to them. You’re a scrap of almost-nothingness in the middle of their great, great sea.”

Seven thinks of Bjayzl’s eyes; the way they went from filled with sparkling warmth when she looked at Seven to a kind of coldness that makes some part of Seven, even now, want to scream, _Please, no, don’t you_ see _me, Jay? It’s me, Seven. It’s me._

She thinks of the way that B’Elanna was…not ‘pushed’ out of Starfleet; not even B’Elanna herself will use that word. _Eased_ out of Starfleet upon Voyager’s return.

And she thinks of the closed expressions on the faces of the two Starfleet captains she attempted to turn to for help helping others during the time before she became a ranger, when she was desperate enough, despite her ambivalence by that point about Starfleet itself, to go to them for help. The implacable lack of care in their eyes, pitiless in the way that the ocean is pitiless, vast in the way that the vacuum is vast. Maybe this is what she truly wanted to scream at Picard, at all of them, when she snapped at him on the bridge this morning: _You think the Borg are the worst thing that’s ever happened to me? Look around you. The Borg dispassionately end lives? People right here in Federation space do the same._

Raffi is, she realizes, crying, just slightly, raising one hand to swipe at her eyes with her wrist as one tear and then another flows silently but inexorably down.

Turning, Seven pulls Raffi gently against her chest, wrapping her arms around her and rocking her gently back and forth.

“I know,” she whispers. “I know.”

Raffi sobs only once, quick and quiet, before her tears turn silent, a few soaking into Seven’s top before they subside. “I know,” Seven whispers once again, though she isn’t sure she does know, not entirely. Seven, returned home half-Borg and half-Human, was always going to be a returning stranger. Earth was meant to be Raffi’s home from the start. What is it, to see the people you’ve worked with and loved and trusted turn away from you as though you are nothing to them?

She thinks of Raffi’s desert, Raffi’s ocean, a wave closing over Raffi’s head as the people she loved turned away from her, some perhaps with justification, some perhaps not. Thinks of Raffi, alone, a bottle of wine calling to her like a lifeboat and a whirlpool.

She rubs a hand up and down Raffi’s arm, and Raffi rests her cheek against Seven’s collarbone, lips still pinched together in pain as she rests there, eyes closed.

If, Seven reflects, you are trapped by an intolerable situation so vast there is no beckoning _other side_ , of course you look for ways to escape to the degree that you can. For Seven, _escape_ was pressing herself forward into a job where the people around her believed that helping people mattered; where she could curl up inside that belief; something solid to hold on to. But she’s lived in this galaxy long enough to know that not everyone finds something solid waiting for them, and that Seven’s doing so says as much or more about luck as it does about anything related to virtue or strength.

If you need to not be where you are—and part of you also thinks that you deserve to be where you are or worse—how hard would it be to turn away from something that is half escape route, half siren-song of deserved-seeming destruction?

Now, she rubs a hand up and down Raffi’s arm again, closing her own eyes. She has been wondering, to herself, how long to stay on La Sirena, with people who need her, before going back to ranging, where people need her as well.

It isn’t a question with an easy answer, not now any more than it was this morning, but now, for the first time, a third option is sparking to life in the back of Seven’s mind.

 _I admire what you do out here,_ Raffi said to her once, _with the Rangers._

Seven has never been naïve enough to think that she alone can sweep Raffi into her arms and save her from addiction or isolation or the exhaustion of treading water all these years. But, until comparing Raffi’s history with what she hasn’t until now articulated to herself as her own form of escape route, Seven hadn’t considered the possibility that she might be able to sweep Raffi into her arms and present her with...not any kind of comprehensive help from Seven herself, but a path outside of Earth and Picard and Starfleet, one where someone of Raffi's abilities would be badly needed, and one that could, perhaps, give her something else solid to hold on to.

There is a scuffling and a knocking on the outside of the turbolift, and then Rios’s voice is calling, “Raffaela Musiker, did you let this stunt-flying Fenris Ranger short out La Sirena’s best turbolift?”

“Here we go,” Raffi says with a theatrical groan, smiling as she pulls away from Seven’s arms to call to her friend, “Yes, Cris, we ruined your ship, how will we _ever_ repay you.”

Seven laughs, watching Raffi stand and step closer to the door as she continues to banter with her friend. Raffi has friends here, and now Seven does too, and maybe this, too, could be something for Raffi to hold on to.

Regardless of what Raffi thinks about the possibilities now floating in the back of Seven’s mind, though, Seven knows what she wants to offer Raffi. A hand to hold. Some research, maybe, on ways to help that go beyond metaphor. Lifeboats, real ones, one way or another; things that, just maybe, they can hold on to together; can row together toward something like a farther shore.


End file.
